Chapter 62
Ava
By the time I arrive at Del Frisco’s, I want to find a corner booth and curl up and take a nap. I’m spent. There’s a red streak in my left eye leashing my pupil to my tear duct, telling the world I haven’t slept soundly in days. My head and neck seem to have gained twenty pounds because I can barely keep them up on my shoulders. And I feel like a fog has descended around my head, giving me zero visibility into reality.
It will get better when this case is over.
Of course it will. Then the next case will hit my desk. And the next. And the—
“Ava! Over here!” Tammy is standing on the rung of the bar stool, waving me over in a way that alerts all of center city to my arrival.
I slip through the crowd, excusing myself as I go, and then I’m wrapped in Tammy’s arms and her scent.
“That was too long,” she says. “If it happens again, I’m calling your boss.”
I chuckle half-heartedly and sink onto the bar stool. She isn’t joking.
Tammy lets out a low whistle and looks me over.
“You know, you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, but you look like you need a vacation already,” she says, signaling to the bartender with the perfectly groomed facial hair.
“I’ve been living off coffee and donuts for two weeks,” I murmur. “I didn’t even make it to my bed last night. Passed out on the couch.”
She scrunches up her nose and turns to the good-looking hipster to order a much-needed round of martinis. She gives him a bone-melting smile and then turns to me as if the smile never happened.
“You know you have options, right? My mom would love for you to work the campaign—”
“We’ve been here,” I sing song. We’ve been here extensively. And while I love Olivia, politics make me itch. Not to mention the forced proximity to my ex. Extra itchy.
She rolls her eyes.
“Or you could go back to school. Or better yet, travel,” she says, popping an olive into her mouth.
I stare at her. Go back to school. And throw away three years of law school and tens of thousands of dollars.
“I’m going to say something you don’t want to hear, but maybe it’s time to tap into the money your mom—”
I put my hand on her mouth. My mom’s money and art are exactly where they should be—safely tucked away. If I spend it, that’s another piece of her I’ll never get back. Tammy looks down cross-eyed at my fingertips until I move it, and then she doesn’t even breathe before diving in again.
“You decided on law so fast, Ava. You barely gave yourself time to breathe after she passed, let alone time to figure your shit out.”
I look down at the mahogany bar so she can’t see that I know she’s right. But it’s too late for all of that.
“It will get better,” I whisper. “It’s just been a hard transition. I’m having reverse culture shock.”
Not to mention the whole shattered heart thing.
“Or maybe you’re in the wrong culture?” she muses.
There’s a long silence between us that is fortunately interrupted by the arrival of my drink.
I say thank you and take a huge sip from the filled glass, letting the gin coat my nerves and drown out Tammy’s intuitive call-outs.
“Alright, enough about me. What’s going on with you? Any word from the embassy?” I ask, and Tammy’s face immediately lights up.
“You got the job!” I say.
“I got the job!”
“Holy shit. This is amazing!” I hold up my drink and she clinks her rim with mine, then takes a long gulp. “When do you start?”
“October twelfth,” she says.
Less than two months. Tammy is leaving me in less than two months. I don’t think my heart can take another separation.
“I’ll be back for Christmas, and you can come stay as many times as you can escape from your torture chamber,” she says softly, putting her hand on my shoulder and squeezing.
“I’m so happy for you,” I tell her.
“I know you are.”
My phone buzzes on the bar and we both look down to see the text from my dad.
Table’s ready. Where are you?
My head and neck gain twenty more pounds at the thought of the few blocks and the dinner ahead of me.
“To getting through dinner,” Tammy says, lifting up her drink with a smirk.
“To your new adventures in diplomacy,” I say, attempting a smile.
I clink my glass to hers, then down the rest of my martini.
I take another bite of tiramisu and shut my eyes.
It’s not perfect—the mascarpone is too sweet and the espresso isn’t bitter enough—but it is still enough to bring me back to that table. I can almost feel him beside me, leaning in to whisper something—
“I spoke to Serena this afternoon,” my father says, interrupting a fantasy that I most definitely shouldn’t be having while sitting across from him.
More work talk. The entire meal has been work talk. And when I ordered dessert he seemed genuinely shocked that I’d want to extend our time together. I don’t want rushed meals and quick goodbyes. I want to sit and eat and enjoy the moment. Even if I’m just trying to work up the courage to confront him about Mom.
“What did you two have to talk about?” I ask, trying to keep the defensive bristle from my tone. Not many people would be comfortable with their father speaking to their boss.
“We needed some documents that she was supposed to release to us weeks ago,” he says, taking a sip of his coffee. “Obviously, we didn’t discuss you. That would be unprofessional.”
I lift a brow. As if that’s ever stopped him from getting into my business before. I shove a mouthful of drowned lady fingers into my mouth and prepare for what I’ve been avoiding since I sat down—even though my father has asked me several times what’s wrong.
He knows me well.
His eyes narrow on me as I swallow, and he leans back in his chair, the lapels of his suit jacket falling open at his flanks.
“Why didn’t you tell me you had accepted the job, Ava?” he asks. “I had to find out from my partner. It was—”
“Why didn’t you tell me that Mom had cancer before?” I interrupt, my voice cracking a bit on the c word.
He puts his napkin on the table and lets out a long breath.
“So many reasons,” he says, looking up at the pendant light over our table. “The main one being that she asked me not to.”
I can’t help the sharp sting of betrayal that hits me in the gut. The idea of my mother keeping things from me stings like a jellyfish swimming inside my veins.
“She never wanted you to see her sick in the first place, Ava. She hated that you left school, even if she loved being with you. She didn’t want your life to revolve around her cancer. And that’s exactly what happened. You left everything behind just to care for her,” he says.
“Of course I did. And thank goodness I made that choice, because she’s gone now, Dad.”
“I know. I know that. I’m just telling you how she felt about it. She wanted you to live without her burden—to love without the fear of what you witnessed.” He pushes his lips together, his eyes glassy and unfocused as he says, “When I wanted to tell you about her history, she asked me to let her handle it. And when she never did, she asked me to let it go. Said your memories were better left unmarred.”
A fat tear falls into the smear of mascarpone on my plate.
“I know you must be angry with me. But after she died, I was so scared that you’d never recover, Ava. You wouldn’t leave your room for months. Barely ate. Barely spoke. You were a ghost. And one ghost in the house was enough. I didn’t know what to do. She was always the one who knew how to give you what you needed emotionally.”
He looks down at his lap and smiles.
“The two of you would go from tears to laughter just like that.”
He snaps, and an image of me sobbing on my teal comforter after my first boyfriend broke up with me fills my blurry vision. She came into my room dressed in black and told me there were tires to be slashed.
“I could never do what she did for you. But I knew how to push you. So when you finally emerged—that’s what I did,” he says with a shrug. “I was terrified that you’d fall back into that hole if I stopped pushing—stopped planning. And I was terrified I’d fall right in there with you. So I worked and helped you work. That kept us afloat.”
I can barely meet his gaze. The pain I see there behind his eyes is raw and real and unnerving. Some part of me needed to see that pain after she passed, to know that I wasn’t alone. Was he hiding that to protect me? I reach for my water to stop the hiccups, then realize it was my heart that hiccupped.
All this time—all the controlling and the hard love and the insane hours spent at work—it was all his way of keeping me from falling back into my depression while he was avoiding his own. Just like my way was filled with plans and checklists and tunnel vision. The tears come harder now, and he reaches across the table and places his hand on mine.
“Ava, I don’t care what you do for a living. I don’t even care where you are while you are doing it. If you aren’t happy, then you are wasting time,” he says, studying me. “And you know better than most how important time is.”
I nod. I know that fact so deeply that I feel it in every breath I take.
“I met her at the hospital,” he whispers. He’s staring at his water glass like he can see the past on the surface of the water. “I was the last thing she wanted, and she was the last thing I expected to find. I had just been brought on by St. Mary’s legal team and she was in her final round of chemo there when we ran into each other in the hospital lobby. We physically collided, me in my brand new suit and her in her head scarf with her romance novels, and God did she dislike me from the onset.”
He laughs and I lean forward, imagining every detail of the scene he’s painting for me. They’d always told me they met in a doctor’s office, but the edges of that half-truth were always blurry.
“She was too young for colon cancer. I can remember being in a state of suspended disbelief every time I found her during my lunch break during her treatment. She told me to go away the first three times, but I made her bet that if I could make her laugh during this awful experience, then I was worth keeping around. Even with that poison inside her she was stronger than anyone I’d ever met.”
He swallows hard and lets out a long breath.
“She stopped telling me to go away by my fourth visit, but she told me that letting me stay was the most selfish thing she’d ever do,” he says. “We were married a year later. And you came shortly after that. You were a miracle in so many ways, Ava. She wasn’t supposed to be able to have children.”
The tears are falling into what’s left of my tiramisu, but I’m holding onto my smile with everything I’ve got. This is the most he’s spoken of her since she passed.
“There’s no right way to go through what we went through,” he says, squeezing my hand. “Your mother—” His chest rises as the corner of his mouth pulls upward. “She was a force. Watching her lose that battle—”
He shakes his head.
“No words can describe what it’s like to sit by while your soulmate wastes away. But I would gladly have taken that suffering and loss over and over for the years we had together. She gave me a trillion happy moments. She gave me you,” he says softly.
I wipe at my face with my napkin while I squeeze his hand. I want to tell him I love him. Tell him I’m grateful for all of his support, no matter how misguided. But I can’t get words out.
“When you find someone like that,” he says, looking over my head into another time, “you don’t let it go.”
He takes a sip of his water and meets my eyes, then adds, “You fight for it. No matter what.”
The waitress appears in my blurry periphery and puts the bill down on the table. My father nods at her but doesn’t let go of my hand.
The tears don’t stop. They just keep coming from whatever watershed of pain I’d been keeping dammed up these last few weeks. But these tears aren’t for my father. They aren’t even for my mother. God knows I cried for her.
These tears are for the one I didn’t fight for.